Not likely to make an impact in optical wavelengths any time soon they could still revolutionize sensors like radars. Good stuff._________________"Life is tough, but it's tougher when you're stupid" ~ SGT John Stryker from "Sands of Iwo Jima".

Yeah I noticed that froggums... I have the hard copy, not the digital subscription.

I'll see what I can dig up. Would I get in trouble for transcribing it? I want to share and all, just not in an illegal way.

For now I'll see if I can dig up references the article was based on. Some of those should be relatively easy to collect._________________"Life is tough, but it's tougher when you're stupid" ~ SGT John Stryker from "Sands of Iwo Jima".

Basically, they've been able to produce materials that have negative refraction indexes, an idea that had been toyed with for some time, but one that no one took seriously until someone managed to produce a material that had a negative refractive index. The properties of a negative refractive index allow for a lense that can resolve details smaller than the wave length of light used. Unfortunately, for wavelengths in the visual spectrum the "compound materials" they've developed would be required to be nano sized. Lawerence livermore has verified these materials work on the microwave scale._________________"Life is tough, but it's tougher when you're stupid" ~ SGT John Stryker from "Sands of Iwo Jima".

Abstract: Recent theory predicts that artificial plasma and artificial magnetism enable a super lens that focuses far below the diffraction limit. This technology, if realized, will have profound impact in a wide range of applications such as nano-scale imaging, nanolithography, and integrated nano photonics. This presentation will discuss a few micro- and nano-fabrication technologies that were developed for engineering complex meta-structures and in the second part, sub-λ photonic "atoms" and "molecules" and the potential applications in nano-scale imaging and lithography. We demonstrated, for the first time, the high-frequency magnetic activity at THz generated by artificially structured "molecule resonance", as well as the artificial plasma. Our experiment also confirmed the key proposition of super lens theory by using surface plasmon. We indeed observed preliminary superlensing at near-field. This talk will be concluded with a vision of the nano manufacturing that will enable the new nano plasmonics and other applications._________________"Life is tough, but it's tougher when you're stupid" ~ SGT John Stryker from "Sands of Iwo Jima".

Abstract: Recent theory predicts that artificial plasma and artificial magnetism enable a super lens that focuses far below the diffraction limit. This technology, if realized, will have profound impact in a wide range of applications such as nano-scale imaging, nanolithography, and integrated nano photonics. This presentation will discuss a few micro- and nano-fabrication technologies that were developed for engineering complex meta-structures and in the second part, sub-λ photonic "atoms" and "molecules" and the potential applications in nano-scale imaging and lithography. We demonstrated, for the first time, the high-frequency magnetic activity at THz generated by artificially structured "molecule resonance", as well as the artificial plasma. Our experiment also confirmed the key proposition of super lens theory by using surface plasmon. We indeed observed preliminary superlensing at near-field. This talk will be concluded with a vision of the nano manufacturing that will enable the new nano plasmonics and other applications.

i presume you know how lenses work? when light passes through a medium denser than a vacuum, it is refracted at an angle, yadda yadda yadda? well, every material has a refraction limit (without fancy fiddling, diamond is the best refractor, which is why diamonds sparkle more than anything else on earth).

these people have fiddled with material on a subatomic level to artificially lower that limit, so that a single lens, without fancy burrowing electron microscopes, can see tiny tiny things.

is the essential gist i get from it.

ah, OK, quick edit. just re-read it.

so they didn't fiddle with a solid material, they took a gas that has been pressurized far far beyond its condensation point (plasma) and aligned its molecules/atoms (sorry, i didn't catch whether this plasma was elemental or some sort of compound) using an electromagnet so that the result is a very very tightly packed, very very regular structure of molecules/atoms. which is what you need for low refraction, only natural materials, and even most manmade ones, have flaws in them cause they're solids, and the more rigid structural bonds in a solid mean that flaws develop more easily (a tiny shift when the crystalline bonds develop means that they're stuck in the "wrong" place).

so, they used a gas. soooooo clever.

i presume the plasma was ionised, so that the electromagnets pulled the molecules/atoms into a perfectly regular structure automatically.